Real World Computing

This is probably a bit of an "oldie" but I have been asked about it a lot recently, so I figured it was worth documenting.  Why would you use this? There's a few reasons why you might need to do an email mail merge. You've got an email that you've got to send to a few people, perhaps it's an invoice or just a seasonal greeting. Whatever it is, you don't have a group to send it to and you don't feel like just pasting everyone's email address into the BCC field. You need to reference specific pieces of data in your email -- data attached to an individual. For example, on an invoice reminder run, you might have a due date, an invoice number, an amount and a project code.  The Procedure 1. Create an Excel Spreadsheet with your people's details in it.  You should use the first line to have column headings like Name, Email and FirstName.  You only really need name and email but if you want to refer to other things (eg: like th...

Attaching files from SharePoint has gotten a little easier of late. I'm not quite sure when the changes happened but they're very welcome.   The new functionality is available in the outlook client and outlook web access. It's available for most SharePoint groups right now, with SharePoint groups created via Yammer following at the end of May 2018. Attachments in the Outlook Client Use the following steps to attach a file via the Outlook client; Create a new Email On the Message Tab, click Attach, Below the list of recent documents, click Browse Web Locations When this expands to show a list, choose Group Files You should see your SharePoint libraries appear in a list. There's a few reasons why you might not see all of your libraries.  If this is the first time that you're using this feature, or if you're using a new installation of Outlook, it may take a while (up to 20 minutes) to fully populate the list of sites. You don't have to w...

Today's world is all about cloud.  We have email in the cloud, document storage in the cloud, data, applications and even development in the cloud. Why Cloud is Best From one point of view, cloud is an excellent choice. You no longer need to worry about; Physical servers which can suffer hardware failures. Storage and rack space for servers Local services, such as Air Conditioning and the Water Supply in the computer room. Local environmental factors, such as storms which can directly impact your infrastructure. Local backups, which can take hours and require special software Tape management (or streaming backup services) Server failover -- this is managed by the cloud sites. Hotfixes and patches to operating systems and applications. Most of the cloud systems offer some pretty good restore functionality too. For example; IBM Connections has some great version control tools which allow you to roll back to previous versions of your file.  This means that if...

Until recently, in fact until Notes 9, our Notes clients used to show email addresses as we typed them in but suddenly with IBM Notes 9, it started showing their Job Titles. We got a lot of complaints about this and the fix wasn't entirely obvious (to me at least), so that's why I'm documenting it here. As you can see, the problem wouldn't be so bad if all of our contacts came from the same company - but they don't. Our contacts come from lots of different companies. So, how do we change this? In your Notes client, click on File , then Preferences . In the left hand panel, click on Contacts . On the contacts screen, change the type-ahead option drop-down to display Internet Address (or you could use company name which is quite useful too). Click Ok . The effect should be immediate, so try starting a new email and typing a first name (then push comma) and see what happens.  PS: Big thanks to Daniel Lechner and Sunanda A Patil f...

Why would you do this? Suppose that you have an externally accessible generic email address for your company; support@mycompany.com or info@mycompany.com. You might expose this to the web and allow people to send messages to you. Setting up an auto-response email will tell the senders that their message reached its destination and that it will be dealt with accordingly.  It's also good practice to include links to FAQs or other useful information. Why 8.5.3 The techniques we'll be using here work in older versions of Notes but some of the options seem to have moved around in 8.5.3.  I figured it was a good time to show you where they've moved to. The Procedure Start Domino Designer and open the Mail file to be modified.  A really quick way to do this is to right-click on the application tab and choose "Open in Designer". In the Left hand panel of designer, expand Code and then double-click Agents.  A new window should appear. Click the action ...

I wasn't happy with the usability of my last post, so I've redone it as a presentation. You can view it fullscreen here; https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dgxzmfwk_82dp8t8gf5 or embedded below.

Recently, the company I work for decided that they wanted to send out an electronic newsletter with a nicely rendered html email. We got some offsite designers to provide us with a html file but it just wouldn't render correctly when sent from Lotus Notes. We were creating the email by creating a new memo then putting the cursor in the body and selecting File, Import. The resulting import was close, but not perfect. On a whim, I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird (it will be a cold day in hell before I use outlook), and set up the outgoing mail server as a SMTP server with our domino server's address. I ignored the POP settings because I wasn't trying to get inbound email. Finally, I tweaked the from address on the email so that it would come from our domain and sent it to our distribution group. The mail went smoothly and correctly formatted. Since my "from address" was an internal mailbox, all replies/bounces will go to that address. People often forget that you ...

A long time ago, it was common practice to simply put your email address on the web using a mailto url link. Unfortunately, this practice results in a ton of spam coming your way courtesy of spambots. A Potted History of Methods Over the years, a lot of different methods for getting around this problem have become available. These include the low tech methods, such as having text which reads " send email to myaccount at hotmail dot com " and needs to be reinterpreted by the reader. The use of escape codes (try http://www.mways.co.uk/prog/hidemail.php for an example), and several other ways of encoding the address in javascript. No method has been more successful than simply giving people a blank form to write their email in. Now, in Lotus Notes/Domino, this is simplicity itself but when it comes to html, you need to write a bit of code - and even then, you need to be careful not to expose anything on the web. Getting External Help It makes no sense to reinvent the wheel wh...

I was reading my daily blogs this morning when I saw an article on Matt Cutt's blog about starting the year with a clean Gmail Inbox and I thought.. Why not do that for Notes? So... here's the procedure. Open Your Lotus Notes Mail to the Inbox . From the Menu , select Folder then Create Folder... When the Dialog box appears, type a name for your folder like " Old Inbox " or if you're really obsessive compulsive like me, 2008 Inbox . Then click Ok . Next, tag all of your old mail in Notes by dragging the mouse down the left hand side. If you've got a lot of mail, you can do this step in chunks or you can choose Select all (Ctrl+A) and simply deselect the new stuff (the 2009 mails). Finally, click on the action bar menu and choose the new folder you created and click Move . Your old mail will move to the new location (where you can easily access it - it's only one click away) and you'll be left with a nice clean inbox ready for the year ahead.

The Problem Recently we moved some of our people onto Blackberry Bold. As part of the process, we've had to delete them off the BES Server and re-add them. It's not only their device PINS that have changed. It's also their SIM Cards (as the older cards didn't always support 3G). I discovered that if you do this, email will still route nicely after activation but the number of past message brought over to the device is quite small. You won't be able to get all your messages but you can increase the window backwards from 5 days before activation up to a maximum of 14 days. Here's how to do it. The Procedure On Your BES (or in our Case , Blackberry Professional) Server, Start the BlackBerry Manager . Click on the Tab Marked Home . In the Tasks box (top left corner), Click the link marked Edit Server Properties . A Dialog box will appear. In the left hand panel of this dialog box, click Messaging . Scroll through the right hand panel of the dialog box to find the...

I've just finished filling out a survey questionnaire for Michael Osterman and I noticed that the same sorts of things just keep on cropping up. I can't figure out why these things are "issues" in this day and age. Certainly, they're not problems for us. I was just wondering if people have email problems because of poor implementations, poor policy, low expenditure or because they're on other systems with less resilience than domino. The Problems Discussed The problems mentioned in the survey were as follows; Spam Outbound Confidential Material Archiving and Retrieval System Management Time Mail File Sizes None of these are issues for us. Spam After struggling for a few years with the Symantec Anti-Spam solutions, I finally redirected our mail through a cleansing service. This service runs our mail through several different Anti-Spam solutions. Anything considered spam is sent to spam@myorganisation.com while all other mail goes to it's rightful reci...

Why would you do this? This technique is very useful for archiving users mail files when the user has left the company. It enables you to have a look at the mail file without having to copy it off the CD and back on to the Domino server. I have also used this technique when somebody's mail file got too big to be really useful when traveling. They were able to take their old mail on CD with them while accessing new mail from a fresh database. Regardless of your reasons for choosing this method, make sure that you comply with your local corporate records retention regulations before deleting any databases from your server. Before you begin These instructions are designed for use with the standard Lotus Notes mail template. If you have additions such as archiving or document management facilities built-in, you will probably need to use the load convert command to convert the database back to a standard Lotus Notes mail database before this procedure can be successful. Procedure Lo...

So why would you do this anyway? Initially, it seems like there is no real reason to use a command line utility when you can do everything using File, Database (or application in Notes 8) Replace Design . I used to think that the only reason I would ever want to do this would be if I have a large number of mail files to upgrade. Then I discovered a curious thing, a simple design replace on a single database can often causes issues with the design of folders. The answer to this problem is load convert. How to use it PART 1: Getting to the Server Console via Administrator Open the Domino administrator Open your server, it probably will be already open Click on the tab marked server Click on the tab marked status Into the left-hand navigator, click server console If the server console isn't already live, you might want to click the Green Triangle Position your cursor in the space marked Domino command. This is where you will type the load convert command. PART 2: Load Convert The s...